The Messenger Matters

A reflection on Ignacio Ellacuría's "The People of God and Liberation"

Liberation needs mediations. I couldn't agree more.

I first heard this idea in different clothing, in an environmental justice course at Garrett, when Reverend Brian Sauder — Executive Director of Faith in Place Chicago — talked about his years engaging donors, policymakers, and public sector agencies. He put it simply: the messenger matters. Depending on the context, depending on the content, there are moments in organizational leadership when the wisest move isn't to send your loudest voice — it's to send your most effective and palatable one. The one the room in front of you can actually hear.

That's mediation. And when I got to Ellacuría's article and read the question of whether Christians should carry out liberation, Sauder's phrase came right back to me. It also sits in the same family as Brueggemann's "prophetic criticism" — the pushing back against policies and structures that centralize power and resources into a select few. Mediation, prophetic criticism, discernment of the times — different names for the same discipline: knowing when, how, and through whom to move.

Ellacuría is precise about what mediation actually is. It isn't a slogan or a posture. "These mediations possess their own structure and dynamism," he writes — and then, more soberly, that the problem with any mediation is that its practice and its results get objectified in history. What I hear him naming is this: history will reframe every mediation, eventually. The motives, the intentions — all of it stays open for the next generation's criticism. Which is exactly why discernment matters in the moment. You don't get to control how history reads you later. You only get to control how faithfully you read the moment now.

From there, Ellacuría turns the whole argument toward the poor, and this is where the article stopped being theory for me and started being a mandate:

"The people of God, as mediators for liberation, should understand itself as the people of the poor, as the church of the poor. She should position herself as the preferential option for the poor." (56)

I loved this. Because today's church, too often, has become an occupation instead of a calling. Leaders aren't discerning the times — they're running programs. The pandemic exposed just how transactional religion had already become: laypeople walking in expecting to be entertained, volunteers checking a box to soothe their own need for validation, or worse — as Illich points out — becoming the very conduit through which the state lures under-resourced communities into a dependent relationship with institutions instead of with each other.

In my own work as an artist and storyteller, I hold tightly to the proverb: until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero. The church has to separate its agenda from imperial power, or it will keep telling the hunter's story with the poor cast as scenery.

Ellacuría's answer is that the church should understand itself as maternal and magisterial — but mostly maternal. As a mother, I felt that in my body before I felt it in my mind. Mothering runs on instinct, on a birthing body's other senses reaching for whatever it takes to nurture, nourish, and protect a new life. I've never met a mother without that instinct in her, even when she's still learning to trust it. Even nursing — the cry of my own children could trigger a physical response in me before I'd consciously registered the sound. Baby cries. Mommy's body answers. No negotiation required.

Ellacuría names that same instinct as the church's calling: a "maternal-based identity, with a mind on life and liberation," creatively doing what Jesus did — preferentially from the poor, for the poor, as the poor. Not eyes and ears trained on the poor from a distance, but every sense — eyes, nose, ears, hands, taste — intimately engaged, the way a mother is intimately engaged with a child she cannot help but respond to. The church, at its most effective, is a tree planted by the everlasting well: drawing from a higher, eternal power, and offering relationship, refuge, and grace so that the poor may be rich in spirit.

Here's why I'm telling you this.

Every organization I work with is, in some form, wrestling with mediation — even when no one in the room would use that word. Who's the right messenger for this ask? Which structure do we introduce, and when, to shift a culture without breaking the trust it took years to build? How do we stay discerning about the times instead of just running the programs we've always run?

And underneath all of it is Ellacuría's harder question: is this organization mediating for the people it says it serves, or mediating around them — checking a box, soothing its own need to feel useful, quietly becoming the very structure it claims to be liberating people from?

That's the audit I bring into a room. Not just "is the strategy sound," but "whose eyes, nose, ears, and hands is this organization actually using?" A mission statement can say the right thing. A maternal instinct either shows up in the room, or it doesn't.

LaSheena T. Jenkins is the founder of LTJ LLC, offering Strategic Organizational & Prophetic Counsel to churches, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations.